Read Online The More You Ignore Me by Travis Nichols - Free Book Online Page B

allows, but I sense that we won’t be able to fully appreciate this oppression without first digging into that loamy humus where we might begin separating the tangled roots of love, desire, loathing, and, I admit it, self-delusion that make up my formative years.
    MFL .
    Again, MFL !
    This was well before the advent of blogs, dear readers, and before I had truly accepted my role as an outsider, so it was a different world, one in which I had to employ a very different set of skills to keep track of my interests.
    Let me explain, and in explaining, let me pull you back to another world, another place, and another time: 1989.
    Yes, in 1989 I was enrolled in a “work-study” scholarship program with the food services department of the state school all the spoiled children of engorged magnates continue to use as a fallback when their plans for received aristocracy fall through.
    There, in Creosotte Dining Hall, surrounded by imbecilic frat boys and airheaded candy stripers, I ran the soft serve stand on weekday mornings.
    As per the instructions delivered to me by a hirsute woman of dubious extraction, I kept the cafeteria’s cabinets full of sprinkles, and I kept the whirring soft serve machine’s various parts in working order using a certain jellied lubricant and scrub brush.
    This was no small feat when every young coed desperately and continually needed “a chocolate one, pleeeze,” though I was (and am!) an efficient enough worker to make enough time for supra–soft serve observations of my peers.
    Yes, I had to wear a silly paper hat, but more to the point: I first observed MFL (whom I will now, in this public space, for legal reasons, call “Rachil”), the inaugural morning of the school year in that Indian summer of 1989, a time when the “punks” all still wore leather, and the cars were all still Japanese made.
    And a beauty like Rachil did not go in for “Prince.”
    At least not when I first met her.
    No, she looked like a young Ally Sheedy, an untouched Ally, an Ally waiting for initiation into the older Ally world.
    She liked her soft serve extra soft.
    MFL . Immediately, it was so.
    I soon learned that “Rachil” worked as a ticket seller at the newly opened University Cinematheque on East campus, and, it happened that I received a school employee discount at this very same University Cinematheque.
    I quickly became the Cinematheque’s most loyal patron, suffering through all the films twenty-year-olds now consider “cult classics” simply so I could have a brief minute of face-to-face interaction with MFL .
    I might have been her MFL , if only I had been given the proper chance.
    Who can say? The past is passed.
    What we can say is that our eyes often met during the ticket transaction, and one time she did indeed touch the side of my hand with her ring finger.
    I felt a spark.
    But, we’ll never know what could have been, because mine enemy (whom I will call from here on out for the very same legal reasons “Corn”) also worked there at the Cinematheque, running the projector from a little dank hovel.
    Even from where I sat in the front row, I could often hear him guffawing his way through the films at the back of the cinema.
    The soul may indeed grow in darkness, but one must consider which particular soul this is before one registers the fact as a positive or negative occurrence!
    Worse still, Corn could often be found hovering outside the ticket booth, practically licking the glass that protected poor Rachil from just such “flirtations.”
    He would stand idly by while she attempted to do her job, horning in on the time that was by rights the customers’ in order to continue some fatuous discussion of Jay McInerney or Norman Mailer (Corn fancied himself an “intellectual”).
    Isn’t it ironical that the cinema was the smithy of their base ingratitude and that my secret screenplay forecasts their future